Burning off a field of dry, waist-high prairie weeds — as is done often at Kane County forest preserves — is a lot easier than the challenge that faced some contractors for Elgin Community College on Wednesday: Somehow they had to burn up the remaining golf turf grass — just 2 or 3 inches high with spring-melt mud around its roots — that remains from the west half of the former Spartan Meadows Golf Course.
The former nine golf holes occupied about 41 acres just south of Elgin Community College’s main campus. After they closed, the City of Elgin sold the land to the college for $8 million in December 2013.
The college now has hired Homer Environmental of Lockport to burn off the grass in a controlled burn and replant the land with native prairie grasses.
A crew from Homer tried to burn the grass a few weeks ago but succeeded only in creating several large black patches of scorched earth. Homer employee Sergio Figuerola said the fires failed to catch hold that day because of wet, cold weather. And when a stiff wind started blowing too much smoke toward adjoining Spartan Drive and McLean Boulevard, the crew shut down the operation lest they cause a traffic crash.
But as the sun shined and the thermostat neared 70 Wednesday morning, a crew from Homer came back to try again.
“We have a little better weather and the smoke is rising better,” Figuerola said as a coworker carrying a flamethrower-like metal can sprayed a mixture of diesel oil and gasoline in a strip along the edge of Spartan Drive. Gushing gray smoke, orange flames lapped along the strip and slowly began to spread toward the center of the former golf course.,
Figuerola said that once all the grass is gone, a crew from his company will return in a few weeks to plant the prairie grass.
Numerous trees also stand on the property and will be left for now. But Figuerola said the fire would be so low that it will pose no danger to those trees. That is one advantage the college’s situation has over the controlled burns on those forest preserve prairies, where flames lap so high and so hot that a controlled-burn crew must take special precautions to protect any tree trunks from heat damage.
Ryan Callahan, the college’s grounds director, said that “the goal is to have a natural prairie appearance. The edges of the property will be maintained by Spartan Drive, McLean Boulevard and along the housing subdivision to the south of the property. These areas will be mowed to a lower length. The center section is being reseeded with a long-stem native grass seed.”
At day’s end, Callahan estimated 80 percent of the plot had been burned.
The 41 acres’ future remains uncertain. When the ECC Board voted to buy the land, College Vice President Sharon Konny noted that “the master plan calls for the college to acquire property adjacent to the college, which will provide space for future expansion of educational services for district stakeholders, as well as provide a buffer zone on the eastern/southern edge of the campus.”
College officials also noted then that the city government had reclassified the half of the property adjoining McLean Boulevard to the “Planned Neighborhood Business District” zoning category, creating a risk that at least that part of the land could have been turned into a strip mall.
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